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Summer Reading
Children can make anything into a toy. Among my daughter's favorite toys these days are tampons. If she can get her hands on a box of Tampax, she is in heaven. Not only does she get to open the box, in of itself a process entailing a variety of motor skills she is delighting in trying out, but she also delights in unwrapping each individual tampon and then carrying it around the house by its string. Kids like to carry things with strings but alas, due to liability issues, toymakers rarely make toys with strings anymore, hence her affection for tampons. Her habit of destroying the boxes to get to the tampons has enhanced (er, make that modified) our decorating scheme. In some homes, you are welcomed into the bath with a bowl of potpourri; in our home it’s a bowl of tampons. While we tolerate my daughter playing with tampons inside the house, my wife steadfastly refuses to allow my daughter to take the tampons to the car, much less anywhere else in public. This is not true of some of my daughter's other toys such as keys, remote controls, or coin jars. Which got me to asking myself, "Why is this? And also, "What is the history of tampons?" and "Why don't I know more about the history of social practices around menstruation in U.S. culture?" In Judaism we have Mikvahs; the Navajo have a kinaalda ceremony to celebrate a girl's first period. All of this is a roundabout way to get at today's topic: summer reading.

There are some summer reading lists for history floating around at other websites, but I'm not going to link to them because I think they are very boring, more wars, and presidents, and that kind of thing. Really, how many books on the Civil War can people read before they say, "Hey, maybe something else happened in American History?" At least for us adults, summer reading is voluntary, for the rising 10th grade (all girls), no such luck. However, they are in for a treat, no really, they are. This summer they get to read Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale. It's a great book and the best introduction to doing history that I can think of. Ulrich provides extended excerpts from the diary, which appear to be banal. She then unpacks the entries using other primary and secondary sources. She reveals a complex world caught in the midst of change. Read it and you'll learn stuff about early America you did not even think you could know. But there is this one odd curiosity: nowhere in the book is menstruation mentioned. I tried searching the diary (which is on-line) for menstruation along with a couple of other keywords. No luck. There is lots of stuff about childbirth and worms and women's economy and battle over land but apparently at no time is menstruation discussed. Not once did she concoct something to help someone with cramps or bloating? Was there no colonial Pamprin? I'm thinking somebody could get a good at least a good article on this and the crossover potential for a book would be pretty spectacular. Maybe a whole field could get started. Just think, one day you will walk into Borders and there will be a whole shelf of books about the history of menstruation right across from the Civil War shelves. It ain't gonna happen, but if you haven't read the Ulrich, go read it, now. Or at least play on the web site, it's one of the best out there and it's hosted by the same folks who host HNN.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009 - 22:49
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Norwegian Wood
It has been a family intensive time for me recently. My mother-in-law came in from Indianapolis. This occasioned a trip to Longwood Gardens down in the Brandywine valley hard on the border with Delaware. The gardens are very beautiful and the fountain show was wonderful. I admit I am a sucker for fountains. I think it might be all the time I lived in New Mexico. There is nothing like living in a parched landscape to make you appreciate water. But one of the shortcomings for me was that there was not enough text panel. There are two kinds of people in this world. Those that look at the object, and those that read the text panel. However, reading the text panel also puts me in the minority. Museum curators say that the average person spends less than 3 seconds reading a text panel. One of the few text panels I was able to find was fascinating although a bit too brief for my taste. It discussed the measures the gardeners were taking to prevent damage from deer. It mentioned that, so far, their attempts to prevent the deer from eating the plants were unsuccessful and said that new measures were under examination. Hm, I know some poachers that can help with that. But even more significant was what I did not see: Norwegian Maples.

I have become quite familiar with Norwegian Maples because the other family thing I did recently was visit my mother on Long Island. I spent a good deal of my time there pulling Norwegian Maples out of her bushes and flower beds. Over the course of the weekend I probably yanked about fifty seedlings, some which I had to dig out with a shovel.I had known that these plants were an invasive species and I had been invited to go on plant-pulling expeditions in various wild areas both public and private over the last few years. But I had no idea how insidious these things were. They actually poison the ground around them to block competing plants! All in all I felt like I was in Day of the Triffids.

The case of the Norwegian Maple highlights one of my areas of interest: Environmental History. Environmental History is a tricky field because the time frame of change is so long. For example, in their intentionally provocative TV show, Bullshit!, Penn and Teller exposed what a fraud most recycling programs are. While many recycling programs are little more than feel good do-nothingisms, the magicians made with the sleight-of-hand to prove their point. (Note to readers, they did not talk about aluminum can or glass recycling; note to self, next time watch show with pad and paper on hand). To point out what good shape the environment is in, they posited that there were more trees now than in 1920 (or maybe it was 1880). Sounds pretty good doesn't it? Except that a more accurate comparison would have been from before the cut over districts of Michigan and Wisconsin were decimated to build Chicago and ditto for the forests of the Pacific Northwest to build San Francisco. Further, you just can't count trees. There are qualitative differences between types of forests. For example, William Cronon in Changes in the Land showed that New England was more forested one-hundred years after European colonization than it had been prior, but that these forests were less productive in terms of food crops, usable timber, and wild game. Even a hundred years is a pretty short time span for ecological history. All this is a roundabout way of getting to this:

Now that evangelicals (LA Times free subscription) are on board with the environmental movement, does that mean God is an Environmentalist?
Wednesday, May 6, 2009 - 22:46
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Call me Pangloss

"Brothers and sisters we are here for one reason and one reason alone, to share our love of music," shouts the church schooled tenor.  "I present to you COUNTRY MUSIC WITHOUT PREJUDICE!"  Thus begins the CD "Horse of a Different Color" by Big and Rich.  It is without a doubt, the most hopeful sign yet, that contrary to what Johnny-One-Note says, the world is getting better and better. 

It's no secret that the rise of the New South over the last fifty years or so has led to a Southernization of American politics and culture.  On the cultural side, the transformations are shocking.  Despite it's inherent inferiority to the open-wheel variant, NASCAR dominates the US racing scene.  (And if you don't think NASCAR is inferior, ask yourself why so many of the top drivers including Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart, and Robbie Gordon come from the open wheel ranks).  Garth Brooks dominated the pop charts in a way that hadn't been done since the Beatles and was followed by the likes of the Dixie Chicks and Shania Twain who took country music to places that old time cross-over artists like Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton couldn't imagine.  The O Brother soundtrack was a surprise hit to everybody including string music advocates. 

But this success has happened in ways that replicates much of the history of segregation of the South.  The embrace of NASCAR and country have gone hand in hand with the rise of the peculiar variant of Southern Republicanism of Bill Frist et. al..  What is really shocking is how hard Nashville and NASCAR worked to obscure their mixed race origins.  As NASCAR grew, black drivers were pushed out and as Nashville took over country-music it hid much of the early African-American influence such as the African-American Western Swing bands (okay, Charlie Pride succeeded but he had been a football player first and he stuck very close to the Nashville script.)  

Nashville's domination of country has led to revolts in the past.  There was the outlaw movement based in Texas, Jimmy Buffett in the Florida Keys, and the alt.country (I actually prefer the term y'allternative but it never caught on) movement of the 90s anchored by Whiskeytown and Uncle Tupelo.  Even the Chicks and Shania had very public spats with the Nashville crowd.  But these were not really movements for social change.  Only Buck Owens' cover of Johnny B. Good released immediately after his full page ad declaring that he would only play country music attempted to blur the color line and that was about 30 years ago.  

So what is different about Big and Rich and why are they such a hopeful sign?  Well, it has to do with who they bring to the party.  Big and Rich may be duo (Big Kenny and Lonestar alum John Rich) but their supporting cast features among others, Cowboy Troy a six foot four inch African American from Texas with an MA in economics who also raps bilinguallyon the album.  "Este music es para toda la gente.  Es muy importante a usar su mente/ So let go of all your preconceived notions/ get up on your feet and put your body in motion!"  Cowboy Troy calls it "hick hop," but not since Sly and the Family Stone has anyone so self-consciously messed with the color line in music.  It helps, of course, that the music kicks ass.  They don't care about your color, place of origin, political affiliation, religion, or who want to have sex with.  This is one party I'm prepared to join.  The fact that I had to try three record stores to find the CD indicates that a lot of other people already have embraced the Big and Rich philosophy.  And that's why the world is getting better and better.   

Friday, July 16, 2004 - 13:04
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listening to the election
Can you predict the winner of the fall elections by watching the pop charts? I am not sure but my completely unscientific research sample gives an unqualified maybe. First, a note on methodology. Billboard makes you pay for access to their information, so I went to the RIAA website and found out what records went Gold and Platinum in the six months before each election since 1980. Then I had to rely on my memory for which albums were actually from that year as opposed to catalog sales. Party music and middle of the road dominated the 1980, 1984, and 1988 elections cycle. Christopher Cross, the Xanadu soundtrack, Rick Springfield, the Pointer Sisters all sold well during Reagan’s big triumphs. 1984 might appear to be more complicated as Bruce Springsteen and Prince both put out major albums that on the surface seem unrelated to or even hostile to Reagan. But although Prince’s album was musically revolutionary it was decidedly apolitical. The political lyrics of Springsteen’s Born in the USA were lost amid the triumphalist music. The depressing title song, originally an acoustic blues number for his Nebraska album, became the Reagan theme song despite mentions of unemployment and failure in Vietnam.

In 1992, the Bush camp should have known they were in trouble when Nirvana was going multi-platinum. It did not really matter what Kurt Cobain was saying, the howl (and the tattooed cheerleaders in the first video) spelled (or screamed) electoral disaster.

While it is always difficult to tell if pop culture is a marker of change or a contributing force, I’m guessing that if the Roots angry new album, the Tipping Point tops the charts, it will be bad news for the current Bush team.
Monday, July 26, 2004 - 14:21
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Why Western Civ (courses) Suck
Discovering World History as a field has been one of the delights of my job teaching Upper School and I am fortunate to be at an institution that is a leader in developing World History curricula for middle and upper schools (that's junior and senior high if you aren't paying for it). Before coming here, I was strictly an Americanist but over the last three years I find I read less and less American history and am drawn more and more to World History. And when I say World History I do not mean Western Civilizations. In fact, I have come to realize that whatever the ideological merits of teaching Western Civ, the whole program is bad history. For example,

1. In Western Civ. you miss out on the Eastern roots of Christianity. Let's face it, a lot of Christian doctrine is rooted in Zoroastrianism, a Persian religion most people have never heard of, Yet it was the first religion to have a judgement day, heaven and hell, and monotheism. You can trace these ideas as they flow into the mystery religions, particularly after the melding of Greek and Persian ideas under Alexander the Great and his successors. Thence, from the mystery religions to Hellenistic Judaism and finally onto proto-Christianity and Pauline Christianity.

2. You miss the economic interconnections of the Old World as it developed from Han China/Imperial Rome through to the beginnings of the Columbian Exchange. These interconnections effected everything from the fall of Rome (due in part to a trade deficit with China) to the spread of Islam into East Africa and what is now modern day Indonesia and the Philipines.

3. You miss out on the Byzantines. The Byzantine empire (or the Roman Empire as they called themselves right up until Constantinople fell) is a fascinating state to study that influenced early Islam and, of course, Russia and Eastern Europe. More importantly, when Western Europe was mired in the horrors of the medieval period, Byzantium kept Roman learning alive and added Arab geography and Indian mathematics (via the Arabs hence, Arabic numerals) to the canon.

4. China. Even well into the 18th century the Chinese economy was larger than all of Europe's combined and into the 19th century Europeans ran a massive trade deficit with China. A world history course doesn't just ask, why Europeans came to dominate the globe in the 19th century, it also asks why didn't China? Plus Zheng He is really cool. Even better, our modern notions of the Civil Service are based on Westerners visits to China and their understanding (or misunderstanding) of the Chinese examination system. The Opium Wars seem less a triumph of western military prowess when you realize that they were a relatively minor concern to a Chinese government mired in the Taiping rebellion in which as many as 20 million perished.

5. The Columbian Exchange (also called the American Exchange). If ever there was a world transforming event this is it and it is truly global in impact. From the trans-Atlantic slave trade, to the adoption of the sweet potato in China (which helped prevent industrialization) to the massive die-off from disease the effects on world population distributions are extremely significant and only make sense when looked at globally.

These are just a few of the ways that the World History lens rearranged my understanding of the past. And I don't think I could teach Western Civ ever again. Not because I think Democracy is bad or I hate the Enlightenment, in fact I'm rather fond of both. It is just that there are better and worse ways of looking at the past. And of the two, World History explains more things better.
Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - 15:41
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Back in the classroom again.
This is it for me as guest blogger. It has been great fun but I have to get back to my day job, some other writing, etc. etc.. My final thought: Jon Stewart just called Robert Novak"a douche-bag for liberty" after dismantling Novak's piece on Kerry's war service and the recent"ads" around it. I've watched the Daily Show two nights in a row now and all I can say is, as much as I love Jon Stewart and crew, it is a sad, sad day for the Republic when I learn more from watching Comedy Central than I can wathcing the nightly news. Sigh.
Tuesday, August 10, 2004 - 23:31
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